I was born two weeks late, and people say I’ll be late for my own funeral.  In between, I prided myself on my success in asking professors for extensions on essay deadlines, and I still remember the total: ten extensions out of twelve requests.  I tried harder as a lawyer to be on time, but I was still late twice over the course of a fifteen-year career.  One time, the arresting officer wrote the wrong court hearing time on my client’s summons, and I walked into court to find that the judge had started the trial without me.  (Somehow we won the case, even though I missed half of the testimony.)  That incident wasn’t my fault, really, though the judge never knew that.

But on the morning of 01-21-85 (I still remember the date), I somehow forgot to look at my calendar.  I got a call from the judge’s secretary fifteen minutes after a hearing I had requested had started.  I walked nervously into federal court forty-five minutes later to find the judge, the other lawyers, my client, and several witnesses silently waiting for me.  I was found in contempt.

I was almost late again this week for another important matter.  We left my mother-in-law’s house in Columbia, Tennessee on Tuesday morning around eight o’clock, and I figured that we had plenty of time to get to my parents’ house in Tidewater, Virginia – the house I grew up in – by ten o’clock that evening to start a two-day visit.  But because of a tractor-trailer accident east of Nashville and my new route through Virginia’s mountains that had proven to be far curvier and slower than I had expected, we had gotten as far as only Danville by ten.  Victoria and the kids wanted to stop at a hotel for the night, but I . . . I couldn’t.

We got to my parent’s place at three o’clock Wednesday morning.  We slipped upstairs without disturbing my parents or their large dog.  Once everyone was settled, I tiptoed up the attic steps.

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Posted July 10, 2009.